Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Not many people like Johannesburg, but I love the place.
Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree.
Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000.
'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.
Coffee must be treated gently and smoothed out. I hadn't realised it was so temperamental.
The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it.
The successful advertising agent is the one who can convince the clients that he knows something they don't.
So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.
Transport is not a ministry the ambitious should accept: no transport minister has gone on to be prime minister.
Winning the Whitbread was a very major thing for me. I'd always been well reviewed, but this made me widely read.
Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good.
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the 'Catholic Herald.'
The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.
I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be.
The great thing about the public is that they're quite capable of believing two absolutely contrary views at the same time.
For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.
I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.
Homer Collyer's chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing.
I have worshipped Berlin from the day I read 'Two Concepts of Liberty' in South Africa. It seemed to make it respectable to be a liberal.
Germany led the world in photography and film: 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and 'Metropolis' are works that, to this day, film buffs revere.
This is the strange thing about South Africa - for all its corruption and crime, it seems to offer a stimulating sense that anything is possible.
It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960.
I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.
There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life.
In his later years, Ramakrishna took up residence at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, from where his radiance extended far, even beyond his death in 1886.
'The Infinities' is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal.
Nadine Gordimer came over just before she died. She didn't want to talk about books or the arts, but about the abuse of the constitution by the government.
Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.
James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave.
Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar's failures.
It was my idea to do a two-hour course of barista training. I was keen to learn how to finish off my coffee with a picture of a heart or a palm tree or, perhaps, a swan.
Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.
Just before the opening of the 20th century, the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, are born into great privilege on the Upper East Side of New York, in a mansion overlooking Central Park.
It is surprising how many people who don't read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant.
Personally, I have detested Gordon Brown since the moment in 2001 when he tried to make cheap capital out of the Laura Spence affair; as his troubles have piled up, I have felt no sympathy for him at all.
It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.
In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.
Someone once pointed out that there are quite a lot of animals in my books, and I'm sure that is something to do with 'The Wind in the Willows.' I must have picked up a rather anthropomorphic view of them.
I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.
When I wrote my first serious novel, 'Interior', I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike's, 'The Coup', which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana.
It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.
Jim Crace's novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives.
I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.
You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.
Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that 'many of us have a road that reaches back into our past'. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 - as he subtitles his book, the 'Highway to the Sun'.
The druidical claims for Stonehenge seem to belong to that bonkers-but-persistent strand of Englishness that believes there is something particularly mystical about the English themselves, who were clearly a chosen people.
Writing 'Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle' must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened.
'The Cauliflower' is full of these bizarre anecdotes, some of them petty, others moving or whimsical, as its many characters try to make sense of the universe in which they live - a universe strange, febrile, and utterly unique.